Tensions and Shared Interests between Public Relations Practitioners and Journalists

Title------Critically examine both the tensions and shared interests in the relationship between public relations practitioners and journalists.

As public relations and journalism, the PR practitioners and the journalist are always related to each other nowadays. Both of them are important factors of the modern mass media, which aim to influence public opinions since the early twentieth century (Coombs and Holladay, 2010). In order to sharp citizen’s opinions, Charron(1989) mentions that the PR practitioners and journalists often prefer to work together and share information as cooperation. The dependent relationship, as Coombs (2010) explains, the PR practitioners scheme to cover through media, while the journalists are exploiting resources from PR officers for low-cost news. The relationship, on the contrary, seems to be tense when the conflict interests become predominant because the actors have disparate and incompatible assignments during realistic practices. Comparing with the journalists, who aim to search the truth and create a series of stories for daily news, the PR practitioners also need to calculate the corresponding effects and influences behind the news itself (Gordon, 2011). The sponsors’ interests of PR are the restraining factors as well. In addition, as Charron (1989) describes, the relationship is always conflict in political categories, while it may switch on cooperation in economic and other dimensions, thus some external factors may also affect on both PR practitioners and journalists. This essay will analyze the current situations and tasks of PR practitioners respectively in order to evaluate the tense and conflict relationship between PR practitioners and journalists. Then will critically explore the share interests between the two actors. Since there are manifold commons and evaluations among specialists, in the following part of this essay, it will critically compare the different commons on the ambiguous relation. After explore the

References: Alison Theaker. (2001) The Public Relations Handbooks, New York: Routledge. pp251-267 Audrey E Averill Elizabeth Gordon. (2011) Public Relations , OXford：Oxford University Press. pp68-97 Cristina Coman Kevin Moloney. (2000) Rethinking Public Relations, New York: Routldge. pp150-165 Ralph Tench & Liz Yeomans W. Timothy Coombs and Sherry J.Holladay. (2010) PR Strategy and Application: Managing Influence, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, pp107-121